11-06-1999

RESOURCES: Cold Wind From Hill Shakes Clinton's Trees

When members of Congress start quoting the Magna Carta, you know they're
really mad. And when they thrash "King William" Clinton and his
"courtiers," as though they were aggrieved barons demanding
their feudal rights, it's time to don the battle armor.


President Clinton won wide praise from editorial writers and
environmentalists last month when, recalling the conservation legacy of
President Theodore Roosevelt, he announced that the U.S. Forest Service
would move to protect the remaining 40 million acres of federal forestland
that still is undeveloped and roadless. Then a cold wind begin blowing in
from the West, where lawmakers see public lands as unavailable economic
opportunities.


Western Republicans led the charge as House and Senate committees began
examining the Clinton proposal on Nov. 2 and Nov. 3. They accused the
President of ducking a confrontation with Congress by taking the
regulatory route to achieve his goal. "We're used to political fights
when it comes to public lands," said Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont.
"Don't deny us that."


So began the yelling and the finger-pointing; the table-banging and the
swearing; the rich rhetoric of the Magna Carta and the Founding Fathers
that is called congressional oversight.


"I'm going to be damn blunt: I believe you and the Administration
chose a political route," Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, chairman of the
Senate Energy and Natural Resources Forests and Public Land Management
Subcommittee, told Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman on Nov. 2. Craig
piled on the medieval imagery, comparing Clinton to William the Conqueror.
He then switched allusions to compare the forest initiative to an attempt
to "assist with Prince Albert's ascension to the
throne."


Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, the chairman of the full committee, took a
more modern approach: tell it to the judge. He said that any effort to
apply the Clinton plan to his home state would violate the Alaska National
Interest Land Conservation Act and could be challenged in court.


On Nov. 3, the House Resources Committee brushed up on its history, too.
Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho, quoted from a 1901 speech by
Roosevelt. Committee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, submitted a statement
citing passages from the 1907 writings of the first chief U.S. forester,
Gifford Pinchot. And Rep. Barbara Cubin, R-Wyo., read from the U.S.
Constitution.


Glickman noted that the government placed a moratorium on road-building in
federal forestland early this year, after Forest Service officials
complained that with appropriations slashed, they weren't able to maintain
existing roads, which now have an $8.4 billion maintenance
backlog.


But congressional critics saw things from a different historical
perspective. Said Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah: "Robin Hood and his
gang enjoyed more freedom in Sherwood Forest than our citizens have on
public land."


Robert Ourlain

National Journal